14 mars – πku

Just as I did last year, in honor of Pi day, I have written you some Pi-kus, a modified haiku form where the lines follow a 3-1-4 syllable structure.

today i
meant
to make a pie

apple with
lots
of cinnamon

or perhaps
a
lemon meringue

a pumpkin
pie
would’ve been nice

alongside
scoops
of vanilla

but instead,
tired,
with empty fridge

i gave up
and
ate leftovers ❂

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

I just added your poem to my student’s kidblog so they can read it and be inspired, too!! I am curious. What was your process? Did you brainstorm lots of kinds of pies? Did you revise lots to get the right syllables? Did it take time or just flow quickly? In the end, it is brilliant!! Just wondering what you did to make it so brilliant!

First, I had the idea to have the ironic twist at the end of the poem, so I started with that. I thought it would be more ironic if I wrote a lot of stanzas about delicious pies so as I wrote I kept thinking of different types of pies and desserts I could add. I mostly revised in my head before writing it down– I tapped out each line and if it worked well, I wrote it down! If not I tried to reformulate the same idea some other way. The hardest were the one syllable lines because I didn’t want them to be boring one syllable words like to or the, so I had to keep jumbling around my sentences until I found a way to make them work! It was more of a quickly flowing process, but it was really fun, almost like a puzzle trying to get all the words to fall just right 🙂